Hymnal Auditors

#On the Office and Its Jurisdiction

A hymnal is a licence small enough to hold in one hand. Every hymnal printed within the Synod's writ carries a serial mark. In the smallest type the presses can manage, that mark certifies that the Bureau of Orison and Song has heard these words, weighed these notes and permitted them to be sung. The paper is cheap and the permission is expensive. Paper travels. A book leaves the press obedient and reaches a barracks three winters later with a split spine, a lost gathering and broth dried across the evening psalm. Nobody can then be sure it still says what Strasbourg told it to say.

The Hymnal Auditors exist in that gap. The Bureau of Orison lists them in its present roll of personnel, between the Cantor-Scribes and the Stanza Marshals, and gives them no more ceremony than that. Their office is narrow, and they are proud of its narrowness the way a needle is proud of its point. Composition belongs to other desks. So do the amendment of authorities and the passing of sentence. An Auditor holds a book against its authorized version and reports whether the two still agree.

The Orison Licensing Acts of A.S. 94 placed every melody, cadence and whistled work-bar under Bureau jurisdiction. Under them, every song is licensed or criminal. Someone has to read the deeds.

#On the Book in Use

Take a hymnal from a working choir: a garrison chapel, a foundry shift, a parish whose cantor has outlived two predecessors and their spectacles. I describe no particular inspection. Records would charge me for the file, and the scene happens often enough to need none.

The serial mark comes first. Is it present, is it legible, and does it belong to an edition the Bureau still recognises? Then come the words, line against sanctioned line, with the Auditor's finger moving down the reference sheet at the same pace as the choir-mistress's breathing. Then the notation, which is where corruption prefers to live. A sharp sits where a natural stood. A held note has shrunk by half. One bar is repeated, or one has vanished into the gutter of the binding. A congregation can sing a wrong bar for years and never notice, because the ear forgives what the eye was never taught to check.

The margins come last, and they make the work miserable. Sanctioned books are rarely clean. A Litany-Engineer's hymnal is thick with oil, warped by trench water and torn at the corners by desperate thumbs. Its margins are crowded with working calculations: powder quantities reckoned against verses, a day's fast set down in lieu of a missing fuse. That book is licensed and filthy, and it is more faithful in the mud than any gilded copy in a cathedral case. So the Auditor sorts. Some marks are wear. Some are a trade's sums. Some are an authorized revision pasted in late with its seal intact. Then there is the remainder: a pencilled change to the music itself, in a hand nobody will own.

The choir-mistress says her predecessor made it. The predecessor is dead. The Auditor writes it down.

#On the Offices Beyond the Page

Orison has many offices and guards their boundaries jealously. The Hymnal Auditor should not be confused with the officers who share its corridors and sometimes its name.

Cantor-Scribes copy. Auditors examine what the copy has become after years in use. Between those two tasks lies the whole distance from the scriptorium to the dirt.

Orison Signal Engineers keep the Synod's voice intact over distance through carrier calibration and saint-dust. They issue Clean Carrier certificates and keep dust custody logs. Their hazard is the broadcast. An Auditor has no business with a carrier, and an Engineer coughing relic powder into a handkerchief has no patience to spare for anyone's hymnbook.

The Sky-Sermon Attendance Auditor shares half a title and none of the method. The Attendance Auditor counts listeners, households and compliance. The Hymnal Auditor counts notes. Households that confuse the two learn the difference quickly and at their own expense.

Tone Inquisitors hunt illicit melody with calibrated forks and bait-cadences. The Unauthorized Melody Smuggler is their quarry. When a discrepancy in a book starts to look like crime, the Auditor's finding passes onward within Orison and out into the wider enforcement apparatus. The signature counts as evidence. Other hands deliver the verdict.

#On the Altered Stanza

In most parishes, a wrong bar produces a wrong hymn, and the worst outcome is a choir that sounds like geese at a funeral. At Essen-of-Hymnsteel, a wrong bar produces a wrong rivet.

Essen is governed by the Tri-Bureau Compact: Engines and Furnaces, the Bureau of Records and Orison and Song, seated together over the crucible and hating one another with the steady devotion of colleagues. There, steel is taught obedience by voice. Calibration stanzas are approved by Orison and sung by paired choirs in the Hall of Measures under Records' cages, so that no stanza ends alone. From those halls come bell-cannon throats, hymn-drive housings and reliquary rivets: parts that must hold under stress without singing back wrong. Introducing an unapproved stanza into a calibration hall is one of the city's red lines. The local saying is cruder and more accurate: Sing it true, or wear it in your ribs.

Any book that enters such a hall is a component, and a corrupted copy can kill. Essen's streets trade counterfeit hymnals with altered measures, and spare stanza sheets move through the duct-markets with the hush-cloth and the forged seals. One displaced interval, faithfully sung by forty tired throats on a pour night, goes into the metal. The metal goes to the Line. What happens on the Line belongs in another file and, frequently, in a casualty roll.

Then there is the Mirror Choir. It is an insurgent network that recruits in the Ash Warrens and works through altered stanza sheets and micro-discord. Its aim is to make the Synod's war engines fail in ways that look honest. It is skilled at making sabotage look like fatigue and heresy look like bad tuning. On the page, its mark can look exactly like an exhausted copyist's slip or a revision that arrived without its seal. The Auditor sees three possible origins for a single mark and must write one finding.

Not every wrong note is the Mirror Choir. Some are fatigue, and some are soup. Essen's own night disturbances, which the city calls holy alignment and its workers call the Wrong Choir, have their own files and their own unanswered questions. I decline to settle them in a paragraph about bookkeeping. An Auditor who blamed every Resonance Bloom on a marked-up hymnal would be wrong. An Auditor who blamed none of them would be just as wrong, and would also be signing off on rivets.

The Pale Chanters are not hymnal clerks' business. The terminology correction is, because an Auditor reading a book must know which differences are corruption and which are simply an edition the Bureau has since improved upon. The Counter-Sorcery Verses and every other approved text descend from authorities held in Strasbourg. A book in a trench is a copy of a copy, and the Bureau asks it to obey as exactly as the original.

#On the Present Custody

As of A.S. 201, the Bureau governs from the Cloister of Calibrated Breath in Strasbourg. The licence hall, the Vault of Tuning and the Master Hymnal Plates are all kept there. These are the authorities against which a book in use is ultimately measured. The books themselves are elsewhere: in parishes and barracks, on foundry lecterns, and inside the tunics of men too frightened to sing without a page in front of them.

They circulate in their thousands. Unauthorized melody persists, because grief and work and lullabies keep inventing what the Acts forbid. The Mirror Choir remains unresolved. Somewhere, at this hour, a choir-mistress is watching a stranger's finger move down a reference sheet toward the bar she corrected in pencil because the printed version was impossible to breathe through.